Reliance Jio

India’s first 4G LTE network, Jio began in 2010 as a bet by longtime wireless innovator Reliance Industries that it could help the country compete in what Reliance president Kiran Thomas calls “the fourth industrial revolution, which will be defined by information, data, and AI.” To build a next-gen broadband infrastructure, the company installed more than 100,000 new cell towers, laid some 155,000 miles of fiber, and built 500,000 square feet of cloud data centers. It then created a device, JioFi, to enable existing smartphones to connect to its 4G network via Wi-Fi, and launched its own mobile phone. Most importantly, when Jio debuted in September 2016, it had to persuade Indians “to overcome their fear factor with consuming data.” Jio dropped the price from as much as $60 per gigabyte to less than $1 and gave the service away for free for the first six months. The bet has paid off: In less than 15 months, Jio signed up more than 150 million customers.